Holyrood are set to fight the battle against homelessness in Scotland.

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DURING a busy December I was lucky enough to spend a little time in several of the world’s greatest cities – London, Berlin, New York and Glasgow.

And you saw them in every one – huddled in doorways, shivering over heating gratings or stretched out on bits of cardboard on the cold, hard pavement… the homeless.

The sight of people sleeping on the streets hits us hardest around Christmas and New Year.

We see them camped out alone on the freezing concrete and we think, with a rush of guilt, about heading home to our families and our soft beds.

Surely even the most cold-hearted it’s-their-fault-they’re-just-lazy Tory can’t fail to be moved by the sight of an elderly man settling in for a night outdoors in a sleeping bag in January?

So it is difficult for me to convey the pride I felt when Scotland’s 2012 Homelessness Act came into force on Hogmanay – when we became one of the few so-called civilised countries to declare war on homelessness.

It is a terrible pity, of course, that days later Aberdeen City Council decided the deep midwinter was the perfect time to announce plans to make begging illegal but let’s try to stay positive for at least one week of 2013.

Under the new law, anyone who finds themselves forced to live on the streets will be entitled to some kind of settled accommodation.

Previously, priority would have rightly been given to families with children. But the new system ensures anyone without a roof over their head is seen as a priority.

This includes that much-ignored group – middle-aged men with nothing really wrong with them except they just can’t cope with life at the moment.

It highlights something many health and welfare professionals will tell you – if you’re going to throw yourself on the mercies of the system, try to be anything except a single male who is just struggling to make a fist of life.

If you’re an alcoholic, a drug addict or have kids, there are systems and provisions in place.

For a long time, if you didn’t fall into one of these categories, they didn’t know what to do with you.

And it happens all the time. You’re not an alcoholic, or a drug addict, or a schizophrenic or any other grand category.

You’re a perfectly ordinary person who circumstances have been hard on – your partner left, you lost your job, the bills and debts mounted up, your home was repossessed.

There’s nothing medically wrong with these people, other than, at a certain moment in their lives, they find themselves unable to cope.

What should a civilised society do with these people?

Should we say, “Well, I can cope so if you can’t, then it’s your own fault. Here’s your sleeping bag and your bit of cardboard – go and get on with it”?

That’s not a society I want to live in. Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon called the new act a landmark ruling.

Shelter Scotland director Graeme Brown said we are now one of a very few countries that had embraced “the cutting edge of progressive homelessness reform”.

And the fact that the Scottish Parliament have pushed through this legislation – and pledged hundreds of thousands of pounds for councils to make the new act a reality – at a time when the UK government are setting their sights on the less fortunate in society as a way of saving money, is even more reason for Scotland to be congratulated.

In truth, though, caring for the people who have fallen through the safety net is neither cause for congratulations, nor a landmark, nor the cutting edge of anything.

If you have the imagination to picture what it’s like to awaken in a freezing dawn in a back alley or on a park bench somewhere, it is the bare minimum that we should be doing.